In the aftermath, the reports came in. There had been two anomalous signatures, spaced less than a minute apart, but nothing more. Both had been in the same location. Either the enemy had arrived and left just as quickly, or they had arrived and been destroyed. There was no way to know for sure.
He was almost beginning to think he could relax when it happened again, barely an hour after the first time. Their response was the same, and the reports gave no more information than they had before.
Another light showed him that the President was waiting for him to answer her urgent call. Chewing his lip, he opened the channel. Lately his life had become a living hell.
***
Gary was waiting when Matthew emerged from the transfer house, and he handed the young wizard something. “It worked again, flawlessly, but there was little doubt of that after the first trial.”
“Always good to double check things when someone’s life is on the line,” offered Matthew.
The android agreed, “In this case I appreciate that more than you can know.”
Matt nodded. “I intend to make sure we all make it back safely.”
“If you have to make any hard choices, don’t think twice about me,” suggested Gary. “The power source for this body won’t last forever. At best, I am on borrowed time here. If there are any sacrifices to be made, let me be the one.”
The young mage grimaced. “I’m not giving them anything else. They’ve taken enough. I’m getting my dragon, and all of us are coming back.”
“Keep it in mind, though,” said the machine. “Things never go as planned.”
“They’re the ones who need to worry,” said Matthew. “If things go badly, it won’t end well for them. I’ll make certain of that.”
***
The rest of the week passed quietly for most of the residents of Castle Cameron, but Matthew continued working steadily. He did make a few changes, under pressure from both Karen and his family. He kept a better schedule, stopping at the same time each night and sleeping late. The work would be done when it was done. That would determine when he left, nothing else, and no good would come from rushing.
He had both Karen and Elaine assist him on a few occasions, their respective gifts being useful for some of the enchantments he was crafting. He probably would have been able to succeed without them, but it greatly improved his progress with less time lost.
Even Moira left her self-imposed exile to visit his workshop, though he had nothing for her to do. He showed more patience than usual with her, answering her questions and generally being more sociable than he had been in the past.
“You’re in a good mood,” she noted.
He shrugged.
“I think it’s the work,” she decided. “You always did like a good project.”
“This is important,” he stated. “It’s not just a project.”
She waved her hand at the workbench. “Look at all this stuff. How many different enchantments have you made? You’re right; it’s not a project, it’s an obsession.”
He gave her an exasperated look, and then his shoulders sagged, “I just want it all to work perfectly. I think I have most of it, but this last part is making my head feel like it might explode.”
Encouraged by this opening, Moira put in, “Maybe if you told me about it.”
“How would that help?”
She glowered at him. “I’m not saying I’ll figure it out for you, but sometimes framing the problem for someone else helps you to sort the problem out in your own mind. Try me. I’ll listen.”
Matthew looked doubtful. In the past, he had found her to be a poor listener; most of his explanations seemed to bore her.
“I promise,” she assured him. “I’ll pay close attention. Tell me what you’re doing.”
He waved his hand at the metal circle that lay on his bench. It was small, a half-inch-wide band of polished metal that was two inches in diameter. Both sides were inscribed with tiny runes that covered almost the entire surface. “I’m trying to get it to move after I activate the main enchantment. The problem is, there isn’t much space left on it for more runes, and the motility part is turning out to be harder than I expected.”
“Why do you want it to move?” she asked.
“The people on Karen’s world have an uncanny ability to find us wherever we appear. I want to leave this somewhere after we get there, but I don’t want it to be destroyed. If I could find a way for it to move a significant distance in a short period of time, that would be enough to keep them from finding it,” he said, relating the problem.
“Won’t they just find it after it moves?”
Matthew grinned. Uttering the activation command and touching it, the ring hummed briefly with aythar and then vanished. To Moira’s senses it was gone—not just visibly, but to her magesight as well.
“That’s a neat trick,” she exclaimed. “It’s just like Elaine’s invisibility.”
He nodded. “I had her help create it. Trying to make it invisible to both sight and magesight was almost impossible without her assistance.” He picked it up with one hand and his arm disappeared up to his elbow.
“Whoa!” said his sister. “Am I going to have to stick your arm back on again?”
Matthew laughed and pulled his arm back, showing it to her unharmed. “The invisibility extends out about a foot and a half around it. It looks sort of strange when you see someone reach into it.”
“Why is it so much larger than the ring itself?”
He sighed, “Hopefully to hide whatever magic I use to move the ring around after I activate it.”
She looked thoughtful. “One of my spell-beasts could fly or run around with it, as long as it was small enough to fit inside the invisibility, couldn’t it?”
“Yeah, but you won’t be there to create one for me, and I’d kind of like it to be built into the enchantment,” he told her.
She sighed, “That’s your perfectionist streak again. Everything has to be organized just so. Couldn’t I make the spell-beast for you right before you leave?”
“I don’t know when that will be,” he said, but then his eyes brightened. “Oh! That’s so simple. I should have thought of that before.”
Moira could tell he’d had his moment of inspiration. “I told you talking it out would help. What’s your solution?”
“Give me a hand,” he replied. “I’ll need your help after all.”
Chapter 45
Dr. Tanya Miller stared down at her handiwork.
She was in a virtual workspace that mirrored one in the physical world. Her actions controlled a multitude of robotic tools and a medical android in her lab. The lab itself was located in Whittington, Staffordshire, near the site of the old Whittington barracks. The base itself was now largely abandoned, but the UN defense ministry had maintained the medical research facility for work on ANSIS after the war.
The machine that lay on the table wasn’t properly an android in the technical sense. It was a cyborg, living tissue working alongside advanced microprocessors to give it the functionality she needed.
Compared to the first generation of ANSIS detector units, this one was in a league of its own, and she couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride in her work. She was still annoyed that she hadn’t been able to use Karen’s neural tissue. The girl had changed, and she felt that that change might have made this model more effective. Instead, she had been forced to use tissue from one of the clones.
Her ‘daughter’ was hardly unique. Tanya had collected samples from numerous She’Har during and after the war, and had grown a wide variety of tissues from them, though she focused on producing neural tissue. She had done much of her work on isolated organs, but in several instances, she had produced full human-like clones. Karen was the only one that she had allowed to be raised as a normal human child would be, though. The others were kept unconscious, used primarily for harvesting the parts she needed.
It would have been better with her brain, she thought
again, for perhaps the hundredth time.
There was no getting around it. A brain produced in a natural environment was more complex and nuanced. The neural interconnections were far better than when it was grown without proper stimulation.
Regardless, she wasn’t about to raise any more subjects as ‘children.’ It wasn’t that she had any moral compunction about harvesting their neural tissue afterward, it was simply the time and annoyances required of child rearing. Nor was she ignorant of the fact that most people would find her practices abhorrent. Asking someone else to raise them was out of the question.
There weren’t many true crimes left anymore. The essence of crime generally involved harm —harm to someone else, harm to one’s self, or harm to the public. With most people living in a virtual world where murder and theft were impossible, where people had whatever wealth they could imagine, harm was a thing of the past. But Tanya knew that this would be viewed differently.
If her fellow researchers knew everything she had done, if the government knew, they’d find a way to make it a crime, if it wasn’t already.
Most of her work skirted the edge. Working with tissues and stem cells wasn’t a problem. Growing full sized clones and harvesting organs, made some of her colleagues feel uncomfortable, but they could console themselves with the knowledge that the clones were never awake and never felt pain. Hell, they never even knew they were alive.
But Karen—they would resurrect the witch burnings of old if they knew about that. That had crossed the line. Or it would have, if she had been allowed to finish the experiment. As it was, no one would ever know what she had intended. She could deny everything.
Still, it was irritating to know that her magnum opus wasn’t quite as good as it could have been. She stared down at the cyborg again and sighed.
Nevertheless, she would proceed. She had never been one to let personal feelings stand in her way. If only Gary had understood that.
Thinking about her late husband only increased her irritation. For most of her life she had seen herself as something apart from other humans. They were hardly worth notice or concern, with their petty squabbles, mean tastes, and sheer stupidity. The only entertainment she had ever gotten from them was when she used their gullible natures to manipulate them.
She failed to connect to them in any appreciable way. Their emotional drives were as alien to her as the She’Har had been. Of course, she knew that were she to be examined by a competent psychiatrist, she would be labeled a sociopath—but she didn’t see that as a bad thing, except in the eyes of others. As far as she could see, it was the rest of her species that was inherently defective.
She might have spent her entire life without doubting that conclusion, if she hadn’t met Gary Miller. He had been different.
Not different as she was, though. No, he was entirely given to the emotions and social bonding that so defined the human race. It was his mind that had caught her attention and eventually won her heart, such as it was. She wasn’t sure on that account. If she had loved anyone, it had been he; but being what she was, she couldn’t truly be sure whether what she had felt for him had been love, or merely a more intense interest than she’d had in other people.
Gary had been passionate, brilliant, and incredibly charming. At first, she’d thought he might have been putting on a façade when it came to interacting with other human beings, as she was, but over time she had come to realize it was genuine. She forgave him for that, though. If anything, it made him more interesting. To discover that a truly world-class intellect could also be so emotional, so caring, had been a revelation for her, and it had never ceased to fascinate her, even though she could never understand it.
She hadn’t wept when he died—she had never truly cried, even as a child—but she missed him. She missed his insight, their conversations, and his ability to explain the sometimes-inscrutable motivations of the other people they dealt with in daily life. Life had become somehow duller after his passing.
She wished he were there today, to see the culmination of her work. Their work, for it was truly a fusion of his research and her own. Death might have separated them, but their legacy would be united long past the years they had known one another.
Tanya laughed briefly when she considered what he would have thought if he had known what she had intended for Karen. He would have been furious. If he were alive she might have given up on the idea, just to avoid the danger of losing him. Then again, she might have tried anyway. Even she wasn’t sure on that account.
In any case, the issue was no longer in her hands. Karen had escaped. His ghost could rest in peace knowing she was safe. Not that Tanya believed in ghosts.
Straightening up, she gave her last order to her AI assistant. “I am ready to proceed. After I download into the intermediate android, I will disconnect. Prepare to transfer command to verbal orders from that unit. Verify that all codes and instructions are stored and active.”
“All codes are stored and active,” responded the AI. She had never given it a name. It was nothing like the AGI her husband had left to their daughter. It had no feelings or true understanding. She preferred it that way. It was much the same as she thought other humans should be, or perhaps truly were, behind all their posturing and acting.
“Begin download,” she instructed, enunciating the words perfectly.
It was unpleasant, having her consciousness crammed into the android. After living on the network for so many years, it felt small and confining being trapped within a physical body. She had despised doing it for all the latest meetings, but this time she was prepared to put up with the discomfort. It was all for progress.
Thirty seconds later, the process was complete. “Transfer successful,” she stated out loud, for her assistant’s benefit, since she was now cut off from the network.
The security protocols required a two-step transfer process, to ensure no contact between the two networks at any point. It was the only way they could be certain that her husband’s rogue AI didn’t contaminate the ANSIS network, or vice-versa. She felt a certain admiration for the man once more, that his last work would be so feared by the current administration, and again, she felt the jealousy that he had left it to Karen.
“I will now begin transfer to the cyborg prototype. I will verify transfer verbally once complete,” she stated.
“Understood,” replied her AI assistant over the lab’s loudspeakers.
Again she went through the strange sensations as her consciousness was transferred to yet another body. This was the most dangerous step. If the machine was flawed, her core identity could be lost. It should be fine, though. The technicians had checked and rechecked the hardware several times over. But one never knew with the cyborg prototypes. The first ones had had some serious glitches due to unexpected effects from the neural tissue interface.
She had fixed those problems, but this new cyborg contained a nearly complete human brain, and there was always the chance that unforeseen problems would arise.
Her perceptions shifted, changing as she began receiving input from her new host’s senses. For a moment, she felt as if she were being turned inside out. She felt an uncharacteristic surge of fear as reality warped around her. Tanya tamped that feeling down quickly; fear did not define her. Fear would never define her. That was the one immutable law of her existence.
The world slowly resolved around her as she began to sort out what she was seeing and feeling. Sight was the most difficult part. Normal vision was present in this body, but it was muddled by a whole new range of experience that was bundled in with it; or perhaps it was touch… it was too confusing to differentiate which was which. She could see/feel everything around her, and the bizarre torrent of new information flooding her mind made her nauseous, something that should have been impossible in a machine body.
Synesthesia, she noted; finding a familiar label for what was happening made her more comfortable with the experience.
I’m still seeing normally
in front of me, but it’s mixed in with this other sight/touch sensation, and that sense also includes things beyond the range of my normal vision, things behind, above, even below me.
“Dr. Miller, please respond. Is the unit functioning properly?”
It was her AI assistant’s voice. She wasn’t sure how long it had been speaking, she had been so overwhelmed by her other senses. “Yes. Please wait. This will take a period of adjustment,” she responded.
“Understood.”
She found some relief in the distraction of querying the prototype’s processors for system parameter checks. Cold numbers and text scrolled across the internal landscape of her mind, soothing her nerves.
I can get through this, she told herself. What might drive a lesser woman insane is as nothing to me. Arrogance was an undervalued quality in her opinion. It had often given her the strength she needed to survive and press on, and it would serve her well today.
Minutes passed into hours as she learned to deal with her new sensory input. In the end she despaired of being able to fully incorporate it, instead relying on the machine’s processing to filter out some of it and present the rest in a more distant, less immediate form. The best analogy for the change was that it was rather like seeing a picture on a screen rather than standing in the middle of it.
If this is what Karen has been experiencing all along, it’s a wonder it didn’t drive her mad. But perhaps the mind is better able to integrate the information into the sensorium when a person is born to it, she thought. Or the problem could lie in the brain harvested from the clone. It might be too naïve, too simple to handle the input.
Thankfully she was getting the information secondhand. Her consciousness resided in the cyborg’s microprocessors, not the organic tissue of the prototype. Her creation used that living tissue as though it were a sensory organ, and hopefully as a tool as well, rather than as a computing medium. Trying to transfer her consciousness into an undeveloped organic brain would have been suicide.
Noting the time, she realized that three hours had passed since she had entered her prototype. It had taken her far longer to adapt to her new body than she had anticipated. She didn’t relish the idea of staying in it for too much longer, either. She wouldn’t be allowed to reenter the regular network for some time, though, at least until she could convince President Kruger that it would be safe to do so.